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by OlivesAndVermouth (BlueEyedLookalike)



Category: Dungeons & Randomness (Podcast)
Genre: Arts and crafts buddies!, Canon Compliant, Gen, Spoilers up to the last few episodes of Arc 2, canon with the addition of arts and crafts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 14:43:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19871341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueEyedLookalike/pseuds/OlivesAndVermouth
Summary: He was slouched against a wall, carefully shaping a chunk of ice in his hands with twitches of a finger and murmured reprimands when it didn’t quite listen to him.“Wow, dude, that isbeautiful.”Kalden startled out of his concentration, then smiled wide when he saw who it was. “Braylon! I did not hear you approach.”Braylon raised both eyebrows and pointed at the ice chunk. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you did sculptures, man?”





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The enormous room that had once housed Amarah was barely recognizable, temporarily converted into extra living space for the eladrin that would soon pass through from Ta’lor, but Kalden still liked it, felt the faint echo of Amarah’s presence in the walls. He was probably being sentimental, but that wasn’t such a terrible thing to be. He was slouched against a wall, carefully shaping a chunk of ice in his hands with twitches of a finger and murmured reprimands when it didn’t quite listen to him.

“Wow, dude, that is _beautiful_.”

Kalden startled out of his concentration, then smiled wide when he saw who it was. “Braylon! I did not hear you approach.”

Braylon raised both eyebrows and pointed at the ice chunk. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you did sculptures, man?”

Kalden looked down at it, confused. It was a half-formed rose, all the petals roughly etched out, half of them jagged edges and the other half already smoothed down to gentle curves. “Oh, this isn’t a sculpture. I’m doing an exercise to increase my control. It is well enough to make storms of ice that bludgeon enemies to death, but higher level magic, especially if I want to create my own spellwork, demands a defter touch.”

Long before he had finished his explanation, Braylon was shaking his head, and before Kalden’s last syllable was out he interrupted, “Nah nah nah nah. I’m not just a man of music. I know art when I see it, and _that_ is art. That’s fucking beautiful art.” He leaned in closer to it, and his eyes went comically wide. “Look at this! You put little veins on all the petals! And they’re almost sorta translucent? This is some serious business, gallery-worthy art right here, Kalden. Why are we not making thousands of gold off this?”

Kalden frowned. “I think it would melt.”

The halfling sighed. “Yeah, true. But seriously, you don’t think this is great?” He plopped down beside the sorcerer and grabbed the ice rose from his hands.

“I think it is useful. I hadn’t given much thought to the craft of it beyond the magical precision it takes.” Kalden formed a stem out of the air, half jagged and unfinished and half delicately wrought, then took the flower from Braylon to combine the two. He twirled it around in his left hand, considering. “I think you’re right. It is rather lovely.”

They examined the rose together, a simple and quiet thing.

Braylon gasped and smacked Kalden in the arm. “You are my favorite person. We can be arts and crafts buddies! This is the _best_.”

Kalden tilted his head. “You practice another art besides music?”

“Boy, _do I._ ”

Years passed, as years do. Whenever they lingered somewhere, be it in or out of doors, the two of them sat together and created, Kalden with his ice and Braylon with his disguise kit full of materials and paints and powders and dyes and thread to tie it all together. As the idea for a specific spell formed in Kalden’s mind, he left off crafting for exercise and instead devoted himself to the beauty of it. He had a solid handle on how to direct his magic, but for his new spell he had now come to the hard work of everything _else_. The beauty of the sculpture, he thought, was another virtue worthy of cultivating in the meantime.

So he carved sculptures out of the air. Dragons with each scale articulated, mountains with every crag detailed, vines that dipped over and under one another like free-flowing water. He sculpted his friends, too, figurines about the length of his arm: Khoury with her bow half-drawn, Daegon glowing with power, Acteronis smiling in his shining armor, Aralove with a hand outstretched to beckon forward or cast a spell, Braylon performing; and as he met and grew to know them, Tatiayana in the middle of a graceful leap, Kallie in her fox form, Elena smashing her sword downwards, Larg standing tall behind his shield. He had been practicing for so long that when he lost his arm, his art didn’t suffer for more than thirty minutes. That night in Lochfort, he had figured out what he could and couldn’t do anymore, Braylon asleep and the rest of his party out to find the Fang at the bar. He’d taken a glove Braylon had been working from before having to rush Kallie and Elena’s disguises and cradled it in icy augments, long serrated claws extending from the fingers, rough sheets on the palm for grip, and bulky yet finely segmented pieces on the back, armor and decoration both. It was a human-sized glove roughly fitted from Kalden’s hand – ironically, the left. He turned the thing gently in his hands when he finished, tempted to wake Braylon to see his face light up. But he was exhausted and deserved rest; Kalden let the ice flake off and dissipate.

“Can’t you make it permanent?” Braylon asked in those early days at Dragonkeep, fresh off the boat from Ki’an, Daegon gone back to Ta’lor and Aralove busy helping her mother, leaving Kalden and Braylon to spin their wheels together. Braylon was beading some elaborate headgear to death while Kalden picked out tiny bristles on the face of a boar.

Kalden paused in thought, shrugged. “I’m sure there are preservation charms, but I do not know them. In the spring, the ice melts.”

“Yeah, but I mean—” Braylon cursed as he accidentally scattered dozens of beads across the room. He sighed in defeat, threw down his project, and turned to watch Kalden instead. “You finish it, you set it down and look at it for like five minutes, and then you _PWOOSH!_ ” The bard opened his hands wide, mimicking a miniatiure explosion.

Kalden shook his head. “If I did not do that, then it would only melt slowly and lose its shape. Where is its beauty then? That is its whole purpose, to be beautiful. It must be ephemeral so as not to depreciate.”

“Okay…Okay, I hear your philosophy talk, but, uh, who cares? Ice melts but like. That’s why we have iceboxes.”

“The natural order should not be interrupted trivially. These things have consequences.”

“For _ice sculptures_?”

Kalden waved a hand and the boar head dissipated in a mist of cold air. “You would be surprised.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Braylon started laughing. “And they call _me_ the dramatic one.”

Their best moments were their collaborations.

A necklace dripping ice crystals; a bust of Tessia with a crown on her head; a gaudy mask with the features accentuated sharply by dark ice.

Two days out from escaping Brightport, exhausted by the fast pace they’d set themselves, Braylon spilled out on the ground by their campfire and brought his bag up towards his face so he could rummage through it without sitting up. “Okay, Kalden, I know you said it’d be too brittle but like—” He pulled out a dark blue hat, the brim of which was completely unconnected to the crown. “—ice stitching though. That light, sorta shiny kind, so it’s really obvious on the outside?”

Kalden took the two pieces and flipped them around in his hands, frowning. “But it would fall apart almost immediately once I stopped concentrating on it, and even then it would be fragile.”

“But it would also look _so cool_. Pun definitely intended.”

“If you insist, but only for a few minutes. Tomorrow. I’ll put it together while we get ready in the morning.”

“Sweet!” He rummaged some more, jostling his lute around and nearly clobbering himself with it. “And I was thinking, I got some loose jewels lying around, haven’t sold ’em yet. Could we make ice rings?”

Kalden nodded and smiled, and they fell into a discussion about carvings and styles before Tatiayana cut in from the side, a hand over her mouth stifling laughter, “This is amazing. Really weird, but amazing.”

Braylon paused mid-rant and wagged a finger at her. “You gotta stay sane while being trapped in a city by a crazy woman. And hey, don’t laugh. Me and Kalden got serious skills.”

Sometimes Braylon would hold up one of their finished projects, ice glittering in the light and somehow never looking like the awkward amalgam it was, and he’d say, “You seriously don’t want to keep this around?”

“It isn’t like the arm I made out of ice; I refresh that all the time,” Kalden would say, or, “They are better this way,” or, “It will remain in memory.”

When Braylon stared at him with squinty-eyed distrust on that road outside of Durnhollow, not a single memory of Kalden left in his head, Kalden wished he had kept one, just one, to prove to him how close they were. But he was empty-handed, only mouthing words, until Braylon found his own journal.

After the earthquake, after Braylon’s mind had cleared, the six of them had sat around the fire together, battered but bolstered by success, a win in a long series of losses. At Kalden’s side, Braylon turned over all those collaborations that now would be forever unfinished, all of Braylon’s favorites that he had kept stowed away.

Before he could ask, Kalden said, “The mountain does not preserve itself. It too must erode.”

Braylon glanced at him, annoyed. “Who’s asking for forever? We’re lucky if we make it through a day. I mean, hell, look at what’s happened in the last month. You lost an arm, Donhurst got eaten alive, Larg _died_. I’d take a month, dude.”

They’d had the argument dozens of times over the last two years. It should have slid off Kalden easily; it wasn’t anything new. But usually Braylon had a half-smile while he said it, the air of a jab in it, something easy, even when the halfling was on the precipice of smacking him. Here, Braylon was uncharacteristically serious, his shoulders tense, bags under his eyes. If Kallie hadn’t made the potion, would Braylon have ever gotten his memories back? What would have stopped him from wandering off once they’d gotten to Esterholt and then losing track of him forever? The very thought hurt Kalden’s heart. His resolve fractured, a deep unseen fissure like the first great _crack_ of a thaw in a winter-hardened river.

He nodded slowly and held out his hand. “I can figure it out. Which one would you like?” he asked, quiet.

Braylon perked up in surprise, a little life shaking back into him. He opened his mouth then closed it. He searched through his bag for a long time, unorganized mess that it was, and then handed him the two parts of the dark blue hat Kalden had once stitched together with ice. “I look badass in it,” he offered as an explanation, humor warming his voice and then a grin.

Kalden grinned back and took the brim and crown, balancing part of it on his frosthetic. “Hell yeah you do.”


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